Minutes 3/28

Minutes: March 28, 2012

Prepared by: Leah Sutton

Present: Leah Sutton, Brooke Hamroff, Casey Weiss, Carmen Ferraro, Robert Yu, Remington Drake, Jordan Peters, Jacqueline Pfeiffer, Suzanne Langlois

Presentation: Jacqueline went over the minutes from last time.

Today’s Topic:

Suzanne handed out an excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “What the Dog Saw." As a class, we read a chapter entitled “The New-Boy Network.” Gladwell tells the story of Nolan Myers, with whom he had a 90 minute conversation at Harvard, to exemplify how job interviews rely on the Fundamental Attribution Error. This error, a fundamental theory of social psychology, accounts for the natural human failure to take situation into account. This led into our discussion of job interviews.

Job Interviews:

When we prepare for job interviews, Suzanne told us, we should arm ourselves with anecdotes that SHOW and don’t TELL these traits that they are looking for. What Myers says in the article, according to Suzanne, is important: smiling, the handshake, etc. is EVERYTHING. The impressions that you give come from some basic and primitive perception on the part of the interviewer. They rely on the Fundamental Attribution Error to try to understand you as a person, when in reality you are in a highly structured context and thus abide by certain behavioral rules that may not truly reflect your personality or tendencies.

Past Assignments: Suzanne graded our press releases: it’s out of 3 points, one of which being content, the second being format, and the third being the visual aspect. She collected our discussion questions about Delivering Happiness and handed them out so we could discuss them.

DISCUSSION:

Is an entrepreneur born or made?

He managed to game the system completely, never attending class at Harvard and always having the drive to make money. We discussed the fact that a lot of what he did was related to boredom. He quit his well-paying job at Oracle because of how little he had accomplished there, despite the amount of money he was making.

Syntax & Tone

The book is extremely personal, raw, honest, and succinct. The book is full of personal anecdotes in which he tells the part of the story that is enough to demonstrate the point he wants to make.

Robert commented that Hsieh told us about enough of his failures to make the story more real and make him seem more human.